Leon Garfield is an example of what talent can do to a children's book writer: it can drive him out of children's books as he follows the development of his material wherever it takes him, and that is precisely what's happened. The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris, for instance, has to be considered as an adult book. Comedy is a serious business in that it relies on dead accuracy of insight—the laughs don't happen unless we recognize ourselves and others in each situation. And the depth of recognition for Adelaide Harris requires adult experience.

Garfield's outstanding characteristic has always been energy and exuberance, his gusto in using words; and this has sometimes led him into overwriting. In The Ghost Downstairs, however, after a characteristically twinkling opening, he settles into what I think is his best and tightest writing to date. His variation of the Faust legend is a conception of frightening power, and wholly a book for grownups.

The measure of his invention is the shocking vitality of his 'What if?': What if it isn't necessarily the Devil who wants to buy the soul of Mr Fast? What if the canny seller offers the mysterious Mr Fishbane seven years of his life in return for wealth, but seven years from the beginning of it? What if, having signed away with his childhood all that was bright and wondrous in him, he finds existence a perdition of betrayal through which he haplessly pursues the self that he has sold?

In this book the theme has dominated the writer and freed him from mannerism and self-consciousness. His sensitivities are heightened, his sense of detail is remarkable: the sound of an iron hoop rolled by the ghost of childhood; a marvellous model of St Paul's made by a cabinetmaker 'long since retired from life size', with the craftsman's giant spectacles lying on miniature Ludgate Hill; the 'gently out-stretched hands' of a young man sleeping in a train compartment—darks and lights evolved within the reader build a shifting chiaroscuro through which moments flash occulting one by one until the end:

'Where shall we go now?' whispered the little phantom, its pale face smiling up into the old man's.

'God knows', answered Mr Fishbane, and his beard streamed out to catch the stars.

The echo of Marlowe's 'See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!' is not out of place; it closes a book that is eerily insightful, demonically vital, and not quite definable, a story in which the unhappy present destroys itself by betraying the innocent past. (pp. 74-5)